March 2, 2011

Good Morning Instructors,

As we get closer to the end of the quarter I wanted to share a unique site with you that might be a great option for your students if they are creating individual or group presentations.  Slideshare is a presentation hosting and sharing site - that was voted the 5th Top Rated Learning Tool for 2010 by the Center for Learning & Performance Technologies -  and could be a great way for students to collaboratively work on or share presentations with one another.  Having students share their presentations with one another takes the learning experience to the next level.  Why, as instructors, should we be the only ones to see our students' great works!  The presentations, most often done with PowerPoint, can be silent or have audio added. 

In addition to presentation publishing, Slideshare also carries with it many other benefits and opportunities.  In addition to being a great free tool for your students' use, it is also a great repository of already created topic based presentations and videos.  Click here to view a tutorial on how to use Slideshare and then click on the following links to take you directly to the repositories of already created slidecasts and  videos.  Yet another tool for added course enhancements.

I encourage you to check this resource out and look around a bit.  If you give it a try - or have your students try it out - let me know how it goes!

Thanks and have a great rest of the week!
Heather Thomton-Stockman
Online Instructional Specialist